


Plus or Minus Five Hundred Years

by Elf (Elfwreck)



Category: No Fandom, Society for Creative Anachronism - Fandom, Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Gen, Mention of isms, Meta, Nonfiction, Originally posted at Dreamwidth, Technology, progress - Freeform, society
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-31
Updated: 2009-05-31
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:35:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23151049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elf
Summary: Star Trek was built on the assumption that 20th century USA was the pinnacle of all human achievement... that human society has, except for some minor diversity tweaks that are currently being addressed, reached its final and perfect form.
Kudos: 1
Collections: March Meta Matters Challenge





	Plus or Minus Five Hundred Years

Inspired by [](http://asim.livejournal.com/profile)[**asim**](http://asim.livejournal.com/) 's post, [The Future is Made Up From Our Pasts.](https://asim.dreamwidth.org/389978.html) Was going to just reply and then this got long.

He talks about race issues in Trek fandom, and how they are similar to issues in the SCA--in both cases, there's a lot of "omg don't bring that weird political stuff in; I just wanna have fun in my fandom," and a number of fans of color saying, "Dude! Me too! And I can't have fun in my fandom if I can't exist there, or if I'm only allowed to be a second-rate minor character!" (In Trek, one doesn't get to "be" a character, but we certainly can imagine ourselves, our future Mary Sue selves, or our hypothetical great-great grandchildren, in those starships.)

I don't do SCA. Missed it by a hair, I think; I've been close to people who did, and I've done some RenFaire. Instead, I did D&D, and later, GURPS. I'm a purist--tabletop with pencils and dice RPGs only; nothing on the computer, nothing involving costumes. And we hit some of those same issues.

In most D&D-esque games, we throw out a lot of "realism" (inasmuch as wizards-n-quests games have realism): female warriors are generally as respected as men, biracial characters are welcome (of course, "race" generally means something different from IRL), peasants can become knights at the flick of a sword, and while there might be jokes about the Duke's nephew being gay, there's no active attempt to kill or disinherit him if he is. Slavery of any sort is rare, and the Noble PC Heroes never partake of it, except when they buy someone to free him.

We take the medieval high-fantasy setting and filter it through our own ethics and cultural mores. Most of the time, we don't even think about it.

We should be thinking about it. Especially in setting like the SCA, or Trek, which are both more constrained for realism than FRPGs. SCA, because it's depicting a specific time in history, and the juggling act of "accurate or at least recognizable representation" vs "diversity and modern liberties" has to give some people screaming nightmares. Trek, because being set in the future means things are supposed to be _different_ \--it's almost as much in our (hypothetical, possible) future as the SCA's in our past; some of us are aware that it shouldn't just have better tech, it should have _drastically different cultural standards_. For everything.

Trek was built on the assumption that 20th century USA was the pinnacle of all human achievement... that human society has, except for some minor diversity tweaks that are currently being addressed, reached its final and perfect form.

We will abolish racism! And sexism! And poverty! And birth defects, and nasty debilitating diseases, and scars from injuries! Maybe not entirely, but as much as humanly possible.

60's Trek didn't acknowledge that we'll likely abolish orientation discrimination along with other -isms, because at the time, straight was "normal" and gay was "perverse, mentally ill." And there's damned little awareness that we may have other "mental illnesses" today, that in the future could be perceived as normal ways of behaving.

Trek doesn't acknowledge that other aspects of 20th-century USA life are... not seeming to work so well, as we start getting rid of the various -isms that supported them. The "nuclear family?" Put that in the bin with the rest of our nuclear garbage; it was based on the assumption that a male patriarch will provide resources, a female subordinate will coordinate them and tend to the rearing of children, who will attend a public* education-house for about half their waking hours between the ages of 5 and 17. Bring in gender equality, and the core of this system collapses. Cut the school attendance down to what's actually needed to educate children, in contrast with what's needed to convince them to do pointless work on demand, and it falls completely apart.

(*Public, even for "private schools," in that a whole bunch of random people will be there. Public school is contrasted here with "private tutor," not with "limited-access school.")

But we're supposed to believe that, several hundred years from now, this system is still mostly practiced.

Do we practice marriage and family as it was done in Europe in the middle ages? Of course not. Our high-status families don't foster their children with other high-status families in order to arrange good marriages for them. Our families living in poverty aren't thankful to marry their girls off at the age of 14 to 45-year-old local businessmen. Rich families don't have a web of servants whose lives they own (not like they did in the 1400's); poor families don't live 12 in a room. Education doesn't mark status the way it used to--poverty doesn't prevent education. (It affects what's available; I'm not saying "anyone can go to college if they try." I'm saying that college-level education is no longer a direct indication of wealth or status.)

And that's without getting into the mores that have changed with the onset of cheap, available birth control. That one's worth a few doctoral dissertations on its own. How much of our family structures were created by the need to provide for children that were the inevitable result of regular participation in one of the most pleasurable activities known to humanity?

Right now, we've got birth control that mostly rests on the female, and doesn't work for everyone, and has a pack of annoying side-effects. (Side effects are different based on method. Condoms cut down on sensation; I sure find that annoying.) If we posit that this is fixed by the time of Trek--that perhaps they have the Vorkosigan Betan system of "everyone gets an implant at puberty; when they want children they have it removed"--the family dynamics would be *drastically changed.*

Even if they just improve the modern methods to where they don't have side effects, or there's a 4-year implant for men that doesn't need removing because it wears out on its own (oh, and you can see it through the skin; none of this "yeah, baby, I'm covered" bullshit), you get different family systems. Add in some issues with planetary colonizing, where making babies is an important part of the job--but not everyone who takes to pregnancy is good at parenting. So you get to bring back fostering, where those who love to raise babies do so, and those whose bodies are good at churning them out, do that.

So on Earth, unwanted babies are almost unknown, and unplanned pregnancies get a weird combination of pity and censure, even more than today; on the colonies, you may have creches, or wet-nurses who always have a cluster of infants to tend, but as soon as they're walking & talking, someone else takes over for those parents. And that's before we start thinking about genetic engineering...

I'm distracted again. The point is, _it would be different_. The tech would _change society_. We got the printing press and clocks and potatoes, and medieval society was dragged out of abject poverty and ignorance and into the industrial age, and the prejudices of that era now seem quaint or offensive to us. (And this creates a problem for reenactors, who want to enjoy the trappings of the era without the bigotry.) And in the Trekiverse, we get computers with universal wifi, and teleportation, and matter replicators, and _aliens_... and these, too, will change society.

We should damn well be paying attention to race, gender, orientation, religion, and so on in our fanfic, and in our fandoms, because what we're currently comfortable with is _not_ what it'd be like in that setting. Our current racial mores should seem just as out of place as if Checkov started using an Atari 2600 joystick to manage the transporter.

THAT'S what the fuss is about. Not that "there is/should not be racism in sci-fi." (Not that "there was racism in the middle ages," either.) But that our current patterns don't work in either setting, and extrapolating something that does, and is still enjoyable to the fans, takes thought and consideration.

I don't doubt there'll be plenty of privilege in the future; it existed in the middle ages, and it's still going strong today. But if the ones who have it in the Trekiverse are the same ones who have it today--then we have failed. Our imagination and creativity have failed to create a new world; we've just plastered new techtoys onto our current world, reinforced our current set of privileges, pushed the idea that 20th century USA is, indeed, the pinnacle of all human endeavors, and it will never get better than Right Here Right Now. To avoid that, we need to understand our own biases, rather than assuming that we are the zero-point on the graph and all other systems are properly measured by their distance from us. (Concept borrowed from a recent LJ or blog entry that I can't find at the moment.)

And that's the same puzzle the SCAdians face: how can it be "the middle ages without the skanky race/sex/class/orientation/religion issues," rather than "a modern event with middle ages clothing?"

Whether we're looking ahead or looking back, we need to look inward first. We need to understand that any culture we perceive, or imagine, is "different from us," not "different from normal." There is no ~~spoon~~ normal.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted at <http://elf.dreamwidth.org/259283.html> where there are comments.


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